hiding in plain sight -- art’s invisibilities

Art is not visible to everyone, strange but true. In group scene at a boat landing, the artist is the one person looking back at you, making eye contact with anyone really looking at his painting. There’s one like this at the Speed in Louisville. The museum at the university of Arizona displays a medieval last supper with, one has to guess, the artist himself looking out, the last disciple at the lower right, making a comic gesture indicating skepticism, somehow knowing the bishop, and all believers thereafter, would never see him. It seemed quite intimate, this five hundred year old joke between the artist and me, maybe all painters, maybe all skeptics. From more modern times, once saw an out-of-the-box starving artist painting in a restaurant, in which the painter, on a production line deep in Mexico, had left a cigarette burning on the edge of a sideboard, unseen by his supervisor, or the salesman, the restaurant owner or any of his customers. Hola back to you, you brave, bored person.

This culture’s sensibility about artwork has become like a searchlight, a beam artificially narrowed and directed by enormous movements of money, public philanthropies serving nobody’s interests but their own. Go ahead and lower tax rates but eliminate those ‘loopholes,’ and listen to the whoosh of gigantic institutions collapsing. That’s ok, it was stolen money in the first place. Cede back to the lower classes their share of your obscene wealth, and give up your pretense of having any aesthetic sense whatever. Just look at the art you like, and what you’re claiming you pay for it. Oh, you say you paid full price -- what a chump. 

It isn’t just up to audience alone to awaken to the stabilizing, confidence restoring attributes of living and working around original art. Art itself, the product of area studios, needs to define a common vocabulary, and to establish a number of familiar voices within the hearing range of its community. The great void between the two should fill up quickly, and art would become more authentic, better. Responding to art isn’t about finding inside jokes and deciphering hidden messages, but nothing is seen without a conscious desire to look. It’s up to the artists to make it worthwhile.